Jess McMullin has posted an interview he did with me a few weeks back, on his bplusd blog (a very good read all around). We touched on a lot of different topics in our 45 minute conversation, which he summarizes as:

• Chatting about the strategy practice at frog. Differences between traditional strategy offering from McKinsey or Bain. The advantages of integrating strategy with a more holistic practice including industrial and interaction designers, engineers, and others.
• Discussion of Org 2.0 companies and how they are better able to take on innovation and create compelling experience-based products, services, and systems. If you’re in an Org 1.0 company, start with a skunk works.
• Dealing with the innovation surplus. Companies that have embraced innovation now have no shortage of fantastic ideas. Now the challenge is prioritization and execution.
• Core insights. Like core competencies, core insights emerge from the unique combination of experience, skills, information, and activities of your organization. Core insights are hard to duplicate in the market, and offer significant competitive advantages.
• Some thoughts on influencing innovation - how can aspiring innovators escape the gravity well of the status quo? If you’re not in a company that embraces innovation, what can you do? Adam comes back to skunk works as one way to build momentum. Look for much more on this topic at bplusd in the coming weeks and months.

 It was a lot of fun to do, thanks to Jess for suggesting it and putting the effort into doing it. You can download the full mp3 from his site.

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a presentation I did a few weeks ago Design Green Now in Washington. This is the slide deck I used to introduce myself and frog for ten minutes or so before the panel discussion itself. It misses quite a bit without the talk over, but you’ll get the general idea!

If you view it on Slideshare, you can see a full screen version.

I’m heading off to Barcelona today for a week, which I’m looking forward to as I’ve never been there. Myself and another frog colleague will be helping run a workshop with IESE, the well-known European business school, for one of their clients. Should be a lot of fun. I’m hoping I’ll have a bit of time to enjoy the city too, and if any of my readers live there, drop me a line through the email box at left, would be great to try and connect. I’m going to hit the Gaudi cathedral, Las Ramblas and the market, and will probably wander in general around the central part of town and the water. Any can’t-miss things I should try to check out?

I’m participating in a couple of sustainability-related events coming up:

April 1: Design Green Now, in Bellingham, WA. Along with panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Arunas Oslapas and Marc Stoiber, I’ll be giving a short presentation and then we will have discussion and Q&A. It’s happening at the University of Western Washington. More info.

May 15-16:  Sustainable Design Seminar. Fellow frog Sara Louise Todd and I will be running a 2-day seminar for the Design Management Institute on sustainable design. This will be held in San Francisco, at frog design’s new studio which is set to open in the next couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this one as it’s providing us a focal point for synthesizing a lot of the thinking that’s been going on about sustainability at frog. We are working hard to make it full of information that covers familiar issues like materials and process choices, but also tackles more front-end strategic choices.

This seminar will address the fundamental issues of sustainable design and introduce a broad range of frameworks and concepts for tackling the often fundamental changes that are required in how a company approaches design and manufacturing. Drawing from a wide range of sources and case studies as well as frog’s own experience, we will discuss the key issues framing sustainable design, how it can be evangelized and initiated in an organization, and how it impacts on choices of product planning, production partners, brand and marketing. The seminar will combine presentations with hands-on activities and breakout groups, wherever possible using the participants’ own products, organizations, and experiences as sources of challenges and opportunities.

Registration is required for this one, and DMI are expecting that it will fill up (there’s capacity for about 25 participants). We will be doing a repeat performance in October in Denver, CO, also.

More info.